


Resplendence is Just Out of Reach

by SandrC



Series: Balance My Deeds With My Misdeeds [37]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspective Bullshit, a deconstruction of the Hunger and the duality of fear and manipulation, good lord I'm back on my bullshit again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-21
Updated: 2017-10-21
Packaged: 2019-01-20 20:50:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12441528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandrC/pseuds/SandrC
Summary: Gods, Merle is everything that John is not, but it is fresh air and sunshine and petrichor and ozone and aloe and dirt. If he closes his eyes, he can construct a simulacrum from olfactory memory alone.





	Resplendence is Just Out of Reach

Fear is a horrifying and constant predator. It never poses an _actual_ threat, instead preferring to torment and tease and stalk and string along. _Make your own decisions_ , it wheedles. _What am I here for? What am I going to do? What am I?_ It never once reveals itself in the way one expects. It always is a few twists and turns ahead of its prey; moving in an intricate dance that, from an outside perspective, is a wonderfully complex waltz of anxiety and terror and catharsis.

John Doe is one of millions that fall prey to fear every second. His mind—a sharp machine ticking away with a million cogs and gears and intricate little bits and baubles that mesh in a way that no organic being could ever comprehend—is perhaps a bit _too_ efficient because it catches hold of the concept of fear and doggedly never lets go. It latches down and nothing short of death would release its grip on fear and terror and oh god run run _run run **run!**_

It starts small, this fear that John holds close, with the unexpected and terrifying death of his paternal grandfather. It is unnatural, John thinks, the way life leaks out of a mortal being. He watches his grandfather—whom he visits over a few weeks while his parents suss out the details of the hospice they are putting him in—and age is horrifying. The body just... _stops_. Cells stop replicating, the heart stops pumping, lungs stop breathing, mouth stops speaking, gravity takes hold of skin and all the surface details and drag it all down in a dribbling and melting movement. The whole of the mortal coil just unwinds in a matter of years that feel like seconds and also an eternity. It's sickening and painful and it grabs ahold of the bonds that tie to all the people that the dying have touched and rips out a hole, leaving a lingering desire of fill it with something, it doesn't matter what, just make the ache and emptiness go away please _please please!_ As John watches the last breath his grandfather ever takes, he is stricken with an immediate and devouring fear.

_I don't want to die._

John Doe does not allow this fear to ride him like a spectral jockey—not at first. It starts out as a shadow, tailing him but unobtrusive. He sees death in everything; sees the life slowly dribbling out of all that lives and is sickened. It's disgusting how mortality consumes all, how life is a chain bound to the weight of death that drags its prisoners deeper and deeper down into nothing. It's pathetic how humanity has developed whole ceremonies around death—pomp and circumstance and shitty, shitty baubles that call to magpies and crows and ravens, the corvids that scream for more. It's supposedly a reminder of life but it's actually a screaming pit of despair and a pity party worthy of the gods of hell themselves.

As humans—all mortal things, really—do, John grows and ages and reaches his prime. In his thirties, John uses his charisma and pull—skills that he honed over the years to combat the fear inside himself (not a jockey yet, but a child, grasping at his hand and dragging him back) and to bend the fears of others to a will that only he knows—to assert himself as an influential voice in the growing society. The world _needs_ him, he convinces them. The world needs him because _he_ knows the world. So his words are a piper's tune luring them into a deep midnight river of fear. Of consumption.

John's fear is more than death now. Age, yes, age is fear because age is death, is loss of life, in small increments. But now there is abandonment and uselessness and inequality and, above all else, _injustice_. All of it is a shade of fear, various wavelengths of horror and dread and existential understanding of the microscopic insignificance of any and every persons existence in the grand weave of All That Is. All together it is black black _black_ ; more an absence than a color. It is void and Void and nothing and Nothing and fear and Fear.

It is Ennui.

It is Dissatisfaction.

It is Entropy.

When he sees the way the whole of everything works—existence, that is, not _everything_ everything because some things are not everything but existence is what it is—he is _appalled_. His fear raises hackles and growls at the injustice and the inequality and the uselessness of all of it. It sneers and he focuses his every might, every word he knows, to tear and shred and rage against the machine.

His world, his people, listen. Of _course_ they do, they are his and he is amazing and _ohh_ the way he makes the world dance—a marionette without strings, voice-activated, jump and how high—is a beauty to behold.

(Though there are others, later, in worlds that are not his, that vehemently disagree. They don't matter, though, so fuck em.)

His fear reaches out and he speaks it into being and the whole of existence—as he knows it—rails against the laws that bind it. They are hungry. They are dissatisfied. They are resplendent.

And the man, John, the voice of a whole plane of existence, sinks into the mire of fear and terror and ennui and entropy and hunger and envy and loses himself. The fear is no longer his so it no longer burdens him. Others take the load for him. He can pilot without worrying; without having those chains around his neck. He can seek and take and take and take. He can find the Light—the laws of creation made material—and devour it again and again and again.

( _One day_ , he promises, _you won't escape. One day the laws will be mine to shred with claws of a thousand realities and a million screaming voices and a billion hands that desire your end_. That keeps him going. His ego. His goal. His Plan.)

It is a lonely and loud existence, not existing. Chasing the Light, devouring realities, finding the Light, and repeat. A cacophony of fear and fear and fear and _fear_. It is what he is now—what _they_ are now. Fear. Hunger.

When the seven birds are revealed—reveal _themselves_ , really, in a way that is foolish and stupid and _wonderfully_ simple—he becomes singular for one moment every year. He ceases being the Voice of Dissatisfaction and simply is John again.

(A _different_ John; a darker and more objective John that looks at the whole of existence with clarity that mortality obfuscates, but still _a_ John.)

It's interesting, John thinks, to be singular for a moment and plural the rest. After an eternity—though time is a _mortal_ concept for _mortal_ minds and they are none of that—of being plural, the silence of singularity is both oppressive and a gift. And Highchurch, Merle Highchurch is the antithesis to everything that Singular John is and everything that Plural John seeks.

Chess is one of the few luxuries that John ever affords himself when he is alive. Wholly, he is very goal-oriented, so hobbies fall by the wayside to his fear and his commitments. Chess, however, is military strategy and perception and planning and foresight, therefore it is a luxury with a _purpose_. And, braggadocios or not, he is _damn good_ at it too.

So when Plural John becomes Singular John for Highchurch, he affords himself chess.

To his delight—confusion, wonder, surprise, elation—Highchurch is actually _quite_ a proficient chess player. If he had been born in the world that John started on, then he would have achieved Grand Master status in almost no time at all. Instead he simply wanders from reality to reality, making Plural John's existence fucking hell by taking the Light and running and _not fucking dying gods dammit!_

( _Like some sort of inter-dimensional hobo_ , Highchurch jokes. John does not laugh. That is early on in their relationship— _relationship!???_ —or whatever that nonsense bond thing that they share is. Singular John is much less emotive then. Plural John holds too much sway but Highchurch is a man with far _less_ charisma than John does with far _more_ appeal in the awkward parental way than John ever considered possible. But that is besides the point. The point is that Highchurch is...Highchurch _is_.)

And, for a moment, a brief shot of understanding and clarity that is without fear, Singular John understands.

But Plural John does not and Plural John rips the one thing that Singular John could enjoy away with a scream and a smile and black fire and fear.

(John, the man that feared, is _sick_ of fear now. He is tired and gritting his teeth; roaring into the wind that drowns him out. His words—once an escape—are a prison that he can never break free from. He damns himself. He curses himself. He screams at himself. He _is_ himself.)

Half a century and then a decade. Nothing but fear and fear and _fear_ and the millions of realities that have become part of Plural John— _the Hunger_ , he huffs, _what a foolishly apt name._ The decade is starvation and Singular John stops being Singular John and becomes John once more while Plural John becomes Hunger, Ennui, Entropy, Dissatisfaction, Fear, Consumption, Envy. Plural John does not become Resplendent; Plural John no longer cares—neither does Singular John, but that's a moot point.

John screams as he loses control of the Plural. Of the Hunger. John uses the words that once formed the Hunger from his own plane of existence to call Merle—his one _true_ friend, or _more_ than that but words and bonds and emotions are wildly different things—into Parlay. He calls Merle to kill John so he no longer has to suffer the fear of the Hunger. So he no longer has to watch his Resplendence slip farther and farther away from its goal. So he no longer has to worry about his... _Merle_.

He should know better. He should know that Highchurch, Merle Highchurch will greet him with a smile and a joyous cry, no matter the situation. He should know that Merle will be as dense as a sack of bricks when it comes to subtle hints about the destruction of the Plural that will soon consume him as well. He should know that Merle will care too much. That Merle will try to save him. That Merle will cry and scream and forgive. _All_ Merle does is forgive.

( _Gods_ , Merle is everything that John is not, but it is fresh air and sunshine and petrichor and ozone and aloe and dirt. If he closes his eyes, he can construct a simulacrum from olfactory memory alone.)

As all things do, John ends. He does not call it dying because dying requires _mortality_ and a form that ages and fears and he has _none_ of those things. His fear left with the Plural. The rest are not even a problem. And Merle, his friend and possibly something _more_ , is kind enough to sit with him to watch the sun rise one last time.

And there is no fear. And John is content at last.


End file.
